The uncertainty of designing in Covid-19 times
What does it mean for the UXer to be working from home?
With numbers of around 20.7M (August 2020 figures) confirmed cases around the world, life has been difficult this year. It has meant staying at home, working from home, having limited contact with other people and so on.
“COVID-19 is a new illness that can affect your lungs and airways. It’s caused by a virus called coronavirus.”
Before the pandemic started in the UK, there was a lot of uncertainty. What does a lockdown look like? How would the world react? What will happen? A lot of questions ran through my head but the main question was what does it mean for the UXer to be working from home until further notice? The lockdown happened a few weeks into March 2020. And for me, as a UXer, temporarily working from home turned out to be working from home for the year.
A life-changing environment
Following news of the lockdown, I began working from home. The immediate transition from the office to home was a life-changing moment for me. It was a totally new environment where I have always worked in offices previously. Conducting user research, facilitating workshops, strategy workshops, getting feedback from my immediate squad as well as other squads within the company, was the normality of a UXer. But how was all this going to work without being with your colleagues and users in the office and a lab? What are the challenges I would come across working from home? What would it actually look like? As time went on, the answers to my questions soon unravelled.
The collaboration of remote working
As the weeks went by, I became more and more involved in meetings. I guess it’s a place for being in touch with your peers. But the meetings were not for the sake of meetings, I got involved with planning and strategy. My calendar kept filling up on a day-to-day basis. I soon noticed most days I only had around 2 hours worth of project work.
That’s crazy, right? However, the immediate effect of collaboration felt stronger than being in the office. It was just organised better and I felt increasingly more involved in the business and strategy. The teamwork within the squad was much more collaborative and the work spoke for itself.
I have to say I was nervous about working remotely in the first place. It was hard to imagine, and I had so many concerns. Will communication be a problem? How do I facilitate workshops such as design sprints, ideation etc? So to understand that, I facilitated a design sprint on the first week of the lockdown to test. And that was the best decision I have made, which gave me immediate confidence in working remotely and validated my thoughts. Microsoft Teams is the first step for remote working. This massively helped the squads communicate. I then introduced Miro to the squad and that’s where the magic happened in the first week.
User research wasn’t a problem as tools out there such as Usertesting.com, Validately and Google forms already exist. Therefore, the remote user research study I conducted on a new page design recently was a huge success. Also, playing the key insights back to the whole company was way easier because this means that anyone can join no matter where they are located.
From the start of being thrust into the unknown, I was sceptical and nervous about working from home. I felt so much uncertainty with designing during Covid-19. I now really enjoy working remotely and am actually leaning towards remote work first. Despite the busyness thanks to tons of meetings and the potential of burnout, there are lots of things I cherish, such as:
- Freedom and flexibility
- No daily commute
- The potential to live anywhere
Key takeaways
- Throw yourself in the deep end to test methods of remote working
- Continue to learn tools, techniques and processes that are fit for purpose
- Validate your assumptions early
- Speak to other UXers in the community
- Join UX design communities on Slack to find answers quickly
- Set up a home office if you can with all the equipment you need and away from where you would sleep
- Always exploring and find opportunities to improve the working relationships
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this, please share it and follow. You can also reach out to me on LinkedIn Simon Hoang.
